The Fifth Discipline was the byproduct of many years of work by many persons

but the booksauthor Peter Sengedeservestremendous credit for weaving

together disparate bodiesof researchin an engaging, practical manner that
changed the thinking of academicsand executives alike. Now Sengeis working
to build a sustainable movement and community around the conceptsof
organizational learning, building a consortium of companiesto test the concepts
of organizational learning, issuesof governance, change,and leadership.

A Conversation
with
Peter Senge: New
Developments
in
Organizational
Learning
ROBERT M. FULMER
J. BERNARD KEYS

Peter Senge is a senior lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is part of the
Organizational
Learning and Change Group. He is author of the widely acclaimed best selling
book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Pmctice of the Leavning Organization and, with his colleagues
Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, Bryan Smith, and Art Kleiner, co-author of The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Leaming Organization.
In reviewing Peter Senges work, Fortune Magazine described his goal in life as that of changing
the thinking of the managerial world. Both his readers and leadership seminar participants would
agree. Recently, Senge and his colleagues established The Society for Organizational Learning (SOL).
This interview was conducted by Robert Fulmer, professor of management at the Graduate School
of Business at The College of William & Mary, and J. Bernard Keys, Fuller Callaway Professor of Business at the Center for Managerial Learning & Business Simulation at the College of Business Administration at Georgia Southern University.
F/K:

You say in The Fifth Discipline that you wrote the book partially because you were
afraid that organizational learning was going to become just another management fad.

SENGE:

There was a very clear notion in my head, an intuition, that the learning idea would
become a fad. I had lived through the vision fad and heard the president of the
AUTUMN1998

33

1.

BuildingSharedVision-the practiceof unearthingsharedpicturesof the future that foster genuinecommitment.

PersonalMastery-the skill of continuallyclarifyingand deepeningour personalvision.
Mental Models-the abilityto unearth our internal picturesof the world, to scrutinizethem, and to make
them open to the influenceof others.
TeamLearning-the capacityto thinktogether which is gained by masteringthe practiceof dialogueand
discussion.

5.

SystemsThinking-the disciplinethat integratesthe others,fusing them into a coherentbody of theory and

practice.

United States talking about the vision thing.

First, I didnt think that I-or the people I worked with-should
stand on the
sideline and watch it [organizational learning] go by. Keep in mind that work in the
field had been going on for 20 years. If the book was to be successful, it was going
to have to be a success primarily as a point of reference. People who examined organizational learning would have to take into consideration the basic ideas of systems
thinking, shared vision, mental models, and the other things that we discussed in
the book.
I didnt think that the book would be the be-all and end-all of organizational
learning. A subject as vast as organizational learning would never have a definitive
statement, nor should it have. It should always be a growing, evolving thing.
Its interesting to look back now, after seven years. As best I can tell, the book
has become a point of reference. In my wildest hopes, I thought the book would sell
maybe 10,000 or 20,000 copies-perhaps
the 10,000 people already actively involved
in this field would buy it. I knew exactly who I was writing the book for. It was the
people really engaged in this kind of work; it was not, at the time, a book to convince
anyone to join the field.
I spent over a year negotiating with the editor at Doubleday, making it clear
that this would not be a how-to book. It took some convincing to make this point,
but she agreed to it and stuck to her agreement. The implication of this was that it
would never sell a lot of copies, because it was not written in the same style as most
mainstream management books.
All of this resulted from the simple vision that I did want to put a stake in the
ground for organizational learning. The hundreds of thousands of copies that have
sold were a complete surprise. Im not even sure that its such a good idea for the
field that this book has been as popular as it has.
F/K:

Using an engineering analogy, you suggested in The Fifth Discipline that five new
component technologies were converging in bringing about learning organizations (see The Five Disciplines). The integration of these ideas in one book was
unique. Would you comment on this?

SENGE:

This integration

34

ORGANIZATIONAL

DYNAMICS

didnt just happen in the book; the book was a byproduct

of about

15 years of work by several persons including me. The Western idea that a person
owns an idea is bizarre-ideas
are very much a product of our lifetime and of all the
people who influence us directly and indirectly.
In any event, the work had been going forward in training, education, and consulting, weaving together the systems perspective and the personal developmental
perspective in an organizational context. My work with two colleagues began in
1977 and 1978, when we created a program called Leadership and Mastery. One
of the three people, Charlie Keifer, was a very savvy organizational consultant who
had been mentored by a man here at MIT named Dick Be&hard-one
of the grand
old men of organizational change. The second was Robert Fritz, a composer and talented musician who, among other things, had played clarinet for Dave Brubeck and
taught composition. My background was systems. Interestingly, the three of us provided the strands that laid the foundation for the work-Robert
was personal mastery, Charlie was the change guy, and I was the systems guy. We all brought our
own personal philosophy to the strands as we wove them together.
F/K:

Could you bring us up to date on your definition

of a learning organization?

SENGE:

Well, the idea of a learning organization has always been just that: an idea. There is
a subtle distinction that not many people understand between generative ideas and
descriptive ideas. You dont want to go out and develop survey instruments and
measurement instruments and ask, Are we a learning organization? Thats like asking, Am I a human being? We can spend a lot of time trying to define something like
this. The learning organization,
technically speaking, has always been simply a
vision, and as a vision it has a life of its own, so that the more reality evolves the
more the vision should evolve. Its purpose is not to exist as an idea-its purpose is
to be generative in the world. Unfortunately,
this is not very widely appreciated.
Robert Fritz dealt with this with a timeless insight: Its not what the vision is, its
what the vision does. If one considers a vision only in terms of accomplishing something, they might set a very easy vision. On the other hand, one might set a very
lofty vision-and
reality moves more as a consequence. Which of those visions is
more important?
The learning organization has always been that second kind of creature. At
the elementary level, a learning organization is still a group of people working
together to collectively enhance their capacities to create results that they truly care
about. That is more or less the definition in the book-a simple definition built on
what learning is all about. Learning is the ability to enhance ones capacity to accomplish something one really cares about. To enhance my capacity to do something I
dont care about isnt really very significant learning.
Today there are a lot of nuances and additional ideas regarding the learning
organization. Most of them have evolved in the last three years, in response to the
question posed by Chris Argyris 20 years ago, What is an organization that it might
learn? That was a great question.
In some sense, an organization doesnt enhance its capacity to learn. In the first
place, it is very difficult to define what an organization really is. No one can really
define what Ford Motor Company or Microsoft really is. Sure, they are legal entities,
and there is a set of buildings. But legal definitions or buildings hardly get to the
heart of an organization, say like MIT or Ford. At a simpler level, we could say that
an organization is a human community. It is a living community of people who have
certain shared responsibilities. Therefore, we have been doing a lot of thinking in the
ACiIlZiMN1998

35

past three years about the nature of learning communities. This has led us to the
question, What is the nature of knowledge?
We realize that knowledge
is
multi-faceted. Consequently, learning communities are diverse and multi-faceted.
They are the broadest possible notion of knowledge-creating
tools, human capability, and practical know-how.

F/K

Tell us about SOL-your

SENGE:

The key issue here is very simple and quite central. And it is one about which our
work for the past 20 years has been silent. How do you organize for learning? What
are the kinds of structural arrangements? What is the necessary distribution of
power? Organizational structure is always about the distribution of power. What are
the sort of governance processes that are conducive to building knowledge and creating new knowledge?
Questions have been brought to us again and again by practitioners. If youre
in a large organization, you must think about this because a big part of what occupies your attention is the question of whos got power and who doesnt, and what
will happen to us if we try change, and people with power dont like it. Part of what
I was talking about earlier-the
backlash-is a natural part of change processes in
which innovators must confront established power structures. We have never paid
much attention to this question until the cumulative evidence was so overwhelming that we realized it was insane not to pay attention.
We arrived at this the same way we got into systems thinking, personal mastery,
mental models, and the other concepts central to our approach to organizational
learning. We did it by applying the question to ourselves first. We asked, How
should the Organizational Learning Center be organized? How should power be
distributed? What should be the governance process? What governance process
would be most conducive to an organization producing knowledge? We started
this about two years ago. What eventually emerged was The Society of Organizational Learning.
SOL represents a very different way to organize for producing knowledge. The
person who helped us with this is probably the best thinker that I have ever met on
the subjects of organizational
structure and organic processes. Dee Hock, the
founder of Visa International, is the person who helped us with our ideas. Hes an
extraordinarily
insightful and effective person. He built the most successful and
interesting organization of the late 20th century. Everyone wants to write about
Microsoft because its fun writing about someone who makes a lot of money, like Bill
Gates. But few people realize that the market value of Microsoft is less than one-fifth
the market value of VISA International.
One reason no one thinks of VISA International is that it has only 3,000 employees. Another is that it has never made anyone a billionaire. The reason is that at its
absolute core, VISAs philosophy of governance is to localize power, authority and,
consequently, wealth. Its a bottoms-up holding company, owned by its memberbanks. Its organizational framework is absolutely fascinating and more radical than
anything else that I know about on its scale.

F/K:

And youre building

SENGE:

Well, VISA provided an inspiration, but we are trying to build on the process that
produced VISA, not copy VISA. SOL is really a marriage of organizational learning

36

ORGANIZATIONAL

DYNAMICS

new initiative.

on this model in SOL?

and Dee Hocks new theories on organizing and distributing

potentially represents a very new stake in the ground.

power and control. It

F/K:

The insignia and acronym for SOL are impressive-with

the nice yellow sunspot and
the acronym that stands for the sun, or source of learning.

SENGE:

Dee told us it took two years to come up with the name VISA. He said what you
need is a word that people anyplace in the world will understand and can communicate. Further, it must be understood by anybody. SOL, of course, is Spanish for sun
and has Latin roots. It fits the criteria well.
SOLSpurpose was worked out through a metaphor. We realized that our purpose had to do with knowledge. We also realized that our economy had not been
able to build knowledge about its most pressing problems: inequality, environmental destruction, concentration of wealth and power, problems that cause institutions
such as school systems or corporations to fail, etc. Why is it that we cant seem to
bring together the best kind of theoretical thinking and the best kind of practical
thinking? Why cant we learn?
We developed a metaphor for knowledge based on the image of a tree. The roots
are like the deep theory-the
deepest timeless insights. They are below the surface
and take a long time to develop. But ultimately the health of the tree is dependent
on the health of its root system. The branches of the tree are like the methods-the
tools-the ways people dig deep to address important problems. The fruit of the tree
is the practical know-how. Ultimately, you know that learning is occurring when
human beings are able to do something that they couldnt do before. The essence of
knowledge creation is the integration of this whole system. The tree is also a system
because a tree produces more trees. What drives the tree as a system? The source of
energy that makes the tree work, of course, is the sun. So, finally, we arrived at the
source of energy that drives the knowledge-creating
system, the human spirit and
energy without which, like the sunshine, there would be no trees and no knowledge.

F/K:

In Communities of Commitment,
an article in the Autumn 1993 issue of Organizational Dynamics, you and your colleague, Fred Kofman, extended your thinking
about learning disabilities to summarize some of the barriers to creating the learning organization: fragmentation
of problem solving, an overemphasis on competition to the exclusion of collaboration, and a tendency of organizations to experiment
or innovate only when compelled to do so. Do these barriers still exist today?

SENGE:

Yes. That article, Communities of Commitment, was really the first place where the
idea of a learning organization as a learning community began to take shape. It had
been bubbling for a long time. I think that all of those barriers are still there-in spades!
In fact, they are probably more there, not less, and I think there is probably a dynamic
of change that we all misunderstand. We must recognize that all of us have a predisposition to linear thinking (A leads to B, B leads to C, etc.) when in fact an awful lot of
change comes from situations where things get worse before they get better. Its similar to the case of non-linear thermodynamics, where we talk about the system having
to become more and more in disequilibrium, or disharmony, in order to move to a
new state of order. I think these are quite common phenomena in nature.
If anything, those learning disabilities are even more present today. We have
observed this in a lot of projects that we have undertaken. When I talked about
putting a stake in the ground for The F@h Discipline, it was a stake to build a collabAUTUMN1998 37

oration, a consortium of companies, that could work together and start to build a
critical mass for learning. Weve had a lot of experience with this consortium in the
past few years. Most of our experience has been very consistent around this dynamic
of change. First, you must create pockets of profound change. One of the things that
we wish to test is to determine if these ideas really work: Can they make a difference? Can people work together in profound change? I think we have found that
the ideas really work. But they also create a lot of unsettlement in the larger systems.
To understand this dynamic, consider that you are never going to bring about
change in every part of a large organization at the same time. There will be certain
areas where people are predisposed to change-or
not to change-perhaps
because
of certain business needs. That means that some parts of the organization
will
progress more rapidly than others. If they are successful and produce significant
enhanced results, the successes will threaten the remainder of the organization. If
people have actually learned and begun to change how they think and act, their
new behavior will also be threatening. Others not predisposed to change will react
with a natural competitive response.
Threat tends to bring out peoples most habitual ways of thinking and acting. Consequently, the fragmentation of ideas and problem-solving becomes a little greater.
In some sense, it is as if you are turning a light up a little brighter and all the small
imperfections in the existing system become more evident. At the same time, this
bright light casts a stronger shadow, and those involved in the new innovative teams
also become blind to their effects as the more traditional system. The net result is that
we have seen people lose their jobs or fail to get promotions that they would have
otherwise gotten. They put themselves very much at risk. In almost every organization that we have worked with successfully, there have been significant casualties.
F/K:

This occurs as people who would

change?

SENGE:

As they try to become more authentic and more trusting, they become a huge threat
to everyone around them. They start talking about things that nobody ever talked
about. There are good reasons why people dont talk about that stuff; you can lose
your job talking about it! So, a simplistic way to think about this is to realize that to
do this kind of work [promoting change and developing learning], you must create
a counterculture.
And the organizations
immune system mobilizes itself in
response. We have not seen an exception to this. The specific outcomes are quite different, and the people who are at risk have invariably prevailed, often by going to
work in other SOL-member companies. But sometimes work has, for a time, come to
a complete halt in companies that were making a lot of progress.

F/K:

This is probably why you have been dealing more with leadership of learning organizations recently. You have an article, I believe, entitled Leading Learning Organizations, in which you deal with the type of leaders that promote learning and the
ones who tend to prevent it.

SENGE:

Yes. First, I think its worth reflecting on what leadership is all about. It has been argued,
though perhaps not proven, that more has been written on the subject of leadership
through the centuries than on any other subject related to management. Obviously,
these are not simply matters about which one makes a definitive or once-and-for-all
statement. It is well that we continue to explore questions such as, What do leaders do?

38

ORGANIZATIONAL

DYNAMICS

become learners try to open up to promote

What do we mean by leaders? Much literature about leadership has been dominated
by a personal perspective about leadership-the
leaders style, the leaders characteristics-even the word charismatic has gotten sucked into this. The tall person with the
booming voice-characteristics
like this are obviously very superficial.
A lot of people who are physically impressive are very shallow. Others who are
very unimpressive physically are very deep. Ironically, the word charismatic comes
from the church and means gifts. So which of my gifts, charisma, are important?
Obviously not just a booming voice or imposing stature. There has been a tendency-maybe
a fixation-to
focus on personal qualities of leadership.
In our writing and thinking on communities of commitment, we have come to
consider a concept that we call the ecology of leadership: How does an organization develop an effective and healthy ecology of leadership? This is to me a useful
metaphor and a useful question. I really believe that leadership is always collective.
Even at the simplest level, we might ask, How can you know that there is a leader
if there arent followers?
Leadership is often exercised by groups and by very diverse types of people in
very different situations. We Americans-perhaps
the Europeans as well-make
a
mistake again and again. We use the word leader as a synonym to mean top management. There is no better way to confuse anything than to use two completely different words to mean the same thing. Use one word. If you mean top management,
say that-dont
use leader. Think about pitchers and catchers in baseball. They represent different roles, but either a pitcher or catcher can be a team leader. And there
are many important leaders in organizations who are not top managers.
Leaders are people who help bring new realities into being. The fundamental
function of leadership is that it is the way in which human beings create new realities. Managers, by contrast, seek to insure the effective operation of an organization
within a given reality, more than creating a new reality. In that sense, most of the
important leaders in organizations are technologists-people
who help people learn
new ways of doing something. They create a new reality around a new set of systems or ways of working. They are also what we call internal networkers, people
who help spread new ideas. In large organizations they are especially important. Of
course, executive leaders also matter. Therefore, it is really quite important that we
begin thinking about leadership communities-diverse
people, working collaboratively in the service of something they care about.
This is why the notion of leadership ecology makes sense. What are the conditions in the organization that permit the growth of different types of leaders? What
are the conditions in organizations that are conducive for leaders to do their workto bring about new realities?
We are in the midst of a major study investigating two different questions: How
do these different types of leadership function-line
leaders, executive leaders, network leaders? And what are the forces that tend to sustain, impede, or undermine
transformational initiatives (initiatives aimed at deep change at the personal, interpersonal, and systemic levels)? As we begin to connect these two questions, a new way of
theorizing about leadership is becoming apparent. There are working papers that deal
with this, and we are now using them to organize research in SOL member companies.
F/K:

Since we frequently work with management

our own interest. How important are games
believe that you have used Peoples Express,
other simulations to drive strategic planning

games, may we interject a question for

and simulations in your work here? I
Hanover Insurance Claims Game, and
sessions.
AUTUMN

1998 39

SENGE:

Yes, games are vital to learning. In fact, you could say that they are intrinsic to learning. But you must define games broadly, because all learning processes involve at
least two elements that define games.
First, you have to learn through doing at some level. From John Dewey forward,
no learning theorist worth his or her salt would say that you could learn without
some opportunity to take action. You know the Chinese proverb: I listen and I forget, I see and I understand, I do and I learn (or I retain).
Second, you need to act in a context that includes safety. The child is a masterful learner in part because the child spends a lot of time playing in an environment
that provides a certain measure of safety. When you meet a person who is 80 years
old and still playing, you meet a person who is a great learner. The spirit of play is
important-the
kind of lightness; lets try it. And so what is a game except the
spirit of play, of experimentation.
We know what children need to play. All learning is experiential and all learning requires safety. If we could only look at ourselves and be as considerate of one
another as we are of our children, learning would occur naturally. If we were around
a child that never played, we would say, Give the kid a chance to play. Why not
give adults the chance to play?

F/K:

From your observations of groups attempting

what is working and what is not working?

SENGE:

Obviously, the reasons for both success and failure are rather complex and hard to isolate in a generic way. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that the two major themes that
separate success and failure are commitment and community. And its not surprising
that these are connected. We have found that committed champions are almost essential for any type of organizational transformation. The process of changing from business as usual to embracing organizational learning as a way of life requires an
unusual degree of commitment, because it insists that large numbers of people change
the way they think and act. There is natural resistance to this, much of it at an unconscious level. People feel threatened, and usually there are setbacks along the way.
When the change hits the wall, thats where community is important. Being a champion for transformation can be a lonely business. Thats why we insist on groups of
individuals within an organization getting involved in efforts associated with SOL.
This is another reason why I believe SOL is important. It provides for a larger community in which people who are experiencing difficulties in their organization can
relate to individuals who have faced similar problems in other companies.

F/K:

Ralph Waldo Emerson used to ask his friends, What has become clear to you since
last we met? What is the most important thing Peter Senge has learned since the
publication of The Fifth Discipline?

SENGE:

Well, you know that was a trick question. Emerson used it to help him remember
when he last saw the other person. By reviewing the topic, Emerson didnt have to
admit that he could not remember their last conversation. But youre asking a legitimate question, so Ill try to respond.
Probably the most important lessons Ive learned revolve around the incredible
complexity of the challenges of creating learning organizations, or attempting to
influence the tension between an incredibly important interest in this type of organizational transformation and the temptation for fadism, where organizations seek

40

ORGANIZATIONAL

DYNAMICS

to become learning

organizations,

simple solutions to extremely complex challenges.

F/K:

What is your next major challenge or objective?

SENGE:

I suppose it involves helping to build a sustainable movement and community

around the concepts of organizational learning. Weve struggled, first with the Center for Organizational Learning (OLC) and, more recently, as we have evolved into
the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL), with how to gain diversity and reach
without compromising the integrity of some very fundamental concepts and commitments. We want to be inclusive, but I worry about the large numbers of organizations that advertise themselves as being specialists in organizational learning
but that actually have very little grounding in the fundamental disciplines. The challenge for all of us here at SOL is to manage and maintain growth, commitment, community, and scope without watering down the principles that make organizational
learning a valuable objective for organizations of all types.

F/K:

What is your personal vision for Peter Senge, circa 2002?

SENGE:

Well, I dont have a quantifiable objective in terms of members or books sold or

many of the traditional measures. I suppose my real vision is to see SOL becoming a
viable force around the world and in organizations ranging from business to schools,
or health care institutions to government, with strong organizational components
throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, Southern Africa, and South America. This would
be a major achievement. Perhaps it is not likely to achieve this level of scope, but its
a possibility.

PI
l$

To order reprints, call 800-644-2464 (ref. number 9869). For photocopy permission, see page 2.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
See Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art
and Practice of the Learning Organization (New
York: Currency Doubleday) and Peter Senge,
Charlotte Roberts, Rick Ross, Bryan Smith and
Art Kleiner, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization. For descriptions of Peter Senges work
beyond the books referenced above, see The
Learning Organization in Action: A SpecialReport

42

ORGANIZATIONAL

DYNAMICS

from Organizational Dynamics (New York:

American Management
Association, 1994).
This special report contains the article, Communities of Commitment,
by Fred Kofman
and Peter Senge as well as other contributions
from the MIT Center for Organizational
Learning. See also Leading Learning Organizations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Organizational Learning Research Monograph).