The five means of development, that create a Learning Organization, are:

1. Personal Mastery
Individual, continuous, life-long learning. Senge also argues that spirituality allows us to
understand the tension between reality and vision. He suggests this is the source of creativity.
2. Mental Models
We have implicit mental models of our world and our organizations. These are the sets of
assumptions, generalizations, or internal images of how the world around us works. We use
them to interpret events. Our decisions and judgement are only as good as the qualities of our
observation and our mental models.
3. Shared Vision
When team members create a vision that they share and jointly own, it brings them together. It
is a basis for creativity, and readies them for change.
4. Team Learning
Group development will outpace individual development in driving team performance. Senge
also distinguishes between dialogue (an exploratory process) and discussion (a process for
narrowing and selecting from options). By working together, a team can tackle complex
problems and bring multiple angles of insight to bear.
5. Systems Thinking
This is the ‘fifth discipline’. It requires us to see an organization as an interconnected whole,
with a complex set of inter-relationships. Processes do not work as simple chains of cause and
effect, but as complex interacting feedback loops that reinforce or counteract each other.