PETER SENGE RICHARD ROSS BRYAN SMITH

CHARLOTTE ROBERTS ART KLEINER

 5 writers with 5 disciplines

Peter Senge
Richard Ross Personal Mastery
Bryan Smith Mental Models
Charlotte Roberts Shared Vision
Art Klenier Team Learning
Systems Thinking

In 1990, Peter Senge published "The Fifth Discipline" (later followed by "The Fifth Discipline
Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization" in 1994).
His books pulled together his extensive research into:

• What different organisations do to build

learning capacity? And

• Why some organisations use learning better

than others?

Senge codified these practices into

what he called 'The 5 Learning
Disciplines' as well as coming up
with the concept-label of 'learning
organisations’.
 Organizational Improvement

According to Senge, “Great teams are learning organizations – groups of people who,
overtime, enhance their capacity to create what they truly desire to create.”

Continuous state of change is Senge’s vision for the productive, competitive, and efficient
institutions of the future.

Generating some thinking and action around change by:

Reports

Strategies Creating and building

great teams
Real Work: Work
of implementation
Collection of reports
theoretical summaries
 Getting Started
It addresses the basic concepts and ideas of the Learning Organization. It means the
continuous testing of experience, and the transformation of that experience into
knowledge-accessible to the whole organization, and relevant to its core purpose.

Each of the five disciplines is explained, and elaborated in the following Four questions.
These questions can help and guide a group's learning and improvement .

• Do you continuously test your experience?

• Are you producing knowledge?
• Is the knowledge shared?
• Is the learning relevant?

A section of getting started is about

the Wheel of Learning (Mastering the
Rhythm of a Learning Organization).

People pass:
Between action & reflection, and
Between activity & repose.
 Systems Thinking (the fifth discipline)

It is a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces
and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems.

This discipline helps us see how to change systems more effectively, and to act more in
tune with the larger processes of the natural and economic world (pg 6).

Systems is the cycles of cause and effect (pg 87). The time of your greatest growth is the
best moment to plan for harder times (pg87). A system is a perceived whole whose
elements “hang together” because they continually affect each other over time and
operate toward a common purpose (pg90).

In A Universal Language the subject-verb-object constructions of most Western

X Languages (where A causes B) make it difficult to talk about circumstances in which A
causes B while B causes A and both continually interrelated with C and D (pg 88).

The tools of systems thinking: Casual loop diagrams, Archetypes (Models), and Computer
models. Systems thinking encompasses a large and fairly amorphous (unstructured) body
of methods, tools, and principles, all oriented to looking at the interrelatedness of forces,
and seeing them as part of a common process. The systems for describing how to achieve
fruitful change in organizations called “Systems dynamics”. The tools and methods are
the “links and loops”, archetypes (standards, models) , and stock-and –flow modeling (pg
89) .
 Reinforcing Loops
when small changes become big changes (pg 114)
The two building blocks of all systems representations are as follow:

Reinforcing Balancing
• Generate exponential growth & Collapse • Generate the forces of resistance, which
• Small change build on itself eventually limit growth.
• Linear thinking can always get us into • Always bound to a target
trouble • Are the mechanisms, found in nature and all
systems, that:
• Fix problems
• Maintain stability
• Achieve equilibrium

Systems thinking recognizes:

- the circular nature of cause and

effect,

- focuses on incentives and the

influence of organizational
structures on individual action.
A good systems thinker can see four levels operating simultaneously (pg 97):

Events Patterns of behavior Systemic Structure Mental models

- Consider all the - Brainstorm about possible - Consider causal - Change the system,
individual solutions, relationship, - introduce a new policy,
events/problems - List all the related factors, - List key interrelationship, - incentives rewards,
- Replacing the events, - Introduce different way of between factors, - Prevailing motivations,
- Improve training thinking, - Discarding hypotheses, - Work on key
program, - Work on patterns of - Draw diagrams assumptions
- improve servicing, - behavior, - Deal effectively with
rewrites of the - Review the problems problems
operations manuals - Restructured targets

To understand the problems and find solutions we can follow the Five Whys step by step (pg 108):

Step 1: Pick the symptom where you wish to start;

Ask the group Why is such-and-such taking place?
* put all the answers on the wall

Step 2, Step 3, Step 4, and Step 5:

* Repeat the process for every statement on the wall, asking “Why” about each one.
* Post each answer near its “parent”
* Follow up all the answers that seem likely
* You will find them converging, a dozen separate symptoms may be traceable back
to two or three systematic sources
 Systems Thinking (the fifth discipline)

It is about bridging the gap between text and context. Offers everyone a deep and refreshing
look at what work can be and should be. All the stories, examples, exercises in five conceptual
touchstones--personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems
thinking. And these disciplines accurately reveal three core tasks in leadership:

1. looking at self,

2. developing others,

3. seeing the larger picture in order to chart a meaningful course.

Learning is essential for sustainable growth, for organizational and personal development. It is
a set of practices and perspectives, which views all aspects of life as inter-related and playing
a role in some larger system. The idea is on reinforcing and balancing.
 Personal Mastery

It is about learning to expand our personal capacity to create results we most desire, and
creating an organizational environment which encourages all its members to develop
themselves towards the goals and purposes they choose (pg6).

The learning starts with each person. For organizations to learn and improve, people
within the organization must learn to reflect on and become aware of their own core
beliefs and visions. Personal Mastery covers the area of individual development and
learning. It covers the self-growth and self-improvement.

Personal mastery is the most

individual of the five disciplines for a
reason:

if individual learning can not occur,

then group learning can not occur.

The maturity to handle creative

tension and pursue total
development are elements of
personal mastery.
 Mental Models
It is about:
-Reflecting upon, continually clarifying, and improving our internal pictures of the world, and seeing how they
shape our actions and decisions (pg6) .

- Are the images, assumption, and stories which we carry in our minds of ourselves, other people, institutions,
and every aspect of the world (pg 235) which guide their institutional directions, practices, and strategies. It is
the pictures that we have in our head which represent reality.

- Differences between mental models explain why two people can observe the same event and describe it
differently; they are paying attention to different details. Mental models also shape how we act (pg 236).

- According to some cognitive theorists, changes in short term everyday mental models, accumulating over
time, will gradually be reflected in changes in long-term deep-seated beliefs (pg 237).

There are 2 types of skills to consider:

1. Reflection: Slowing down out thinking
process awareness of how we form our
mental models.
2. Inquiry: Sharing views openly, developing
knowledge about each other assumptions
Mental models are simplifications of reality.
Mental models are a good thing as long as they
are explicit. The danger is when implicit mental
models are considered universal truths rather
than sets of conditions that reflect a place and
time.
 The Ladder of inference

It is a common mental pathway of increasing abstraction, often leading to misguided beliefs

(pg 243).

I take actions based on my beliefs

I adapt Beliefs about the word

The
I draw conclusions reflexive
loop
I make Assumptions based on the meanings I added (our
beliefs
affect
I add Meanings (cultural and personal) what data
we select
next time)
Select “Data” from what I obsrve

Observable “data” and experiences

We can improve our communications through reflection, and by using the laddr of inference in
three ways (pg 245):
1. Reflection  Awareness of our own thinking and reasoning
2. Advocacy  Making our thinking and reasoning more visible to others
3. Inquiry  Inquiring into others’ thinking and reasoning
 Shared Vision

It is about building a sense of commitment in a group, by developing shared images of

the future we seek to create, and the principles and guiding practices by which we hope
to get there (pg6).

The discipline of building shared vision is centered around a never-ending process,

whereby people in an organization articulate their common stories – around vision,
purpose, values, why their work matters, and how it fits in the larger world (pg298).

It offers many strategies and perspectives on how to move an organization toward

continuous reflection, and also find a common cause with the rest of the people in the
organization, something that all work for. It is about the case for the stakeholders of an
organization to adapt their: vision Values Purpose goals

When a team has a shared

vision, they are all pulling in
approximately the same
direction.
 Key precepts for a successful strategy for building shared vision (pg 298)

1. A deep purpose that expresses the organizations reason for existence.

2. An organizations founders’ aspirations, and the reasons why its industry came into being.

3. Not all visions are equal. Visions must emerge from many people reflecting on the
organization’s purpose.
4. To become more aware of the organization’s purpose ask the members of the organization
and learn to listen for the answers.
5. Designing and evolving ongoing processes in which people at every level of the
organization, in every role, can speak from the heart about what really matters to them and be
heard - by senior management and each other
6. “Creative tension” – the innate pull that emerges when we hold cleared pictures of our
vision close to or side by side with current reality.

In conclusion the shared vision discipline is essentially focused around building shared meaning,
Potentially none existed before. Shared meaning is a collective sense of what is important, and
why?
The following picture shows the five stages:

The further to the left the more the organization depends on a strong leader to tell
everyone what the shared vision should be.

The further to the right the more leadership, direction-setting, and learning capacity
the organization as a whole must have
 Team Learning

It is about transforming conversational and collective thinking skills, so that

groups of people can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the
sum of individual member’s talents (pg6)

As we work with other people in teams or groups, we need to pass the stuff that
we have learnt and the wisdom we've acquired to others. At this stage, the
learning is no longer that of the individual, but the group.

It rely mostly on the work of William Isaacs and others, and make a case for
educating organization members in the processes and skills of dialogue and
skillful discussion.

Learning as a team also requires each of the other four disciplines to work well. Each member
of the team should have a level of personal mastery and acceptance of the shared vision.