Personal Mastery

A commitment to personal growth and learning. Includes: personal vision, holding creative tension, commitment to the truth, and integrating reason and intuition.

Mental Models

Deeply engrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images which influence learning. The beliefs that people hold about the world, change, and reality that may be impeding the change process or limiting growth.

Shared Vision

A set of principles and guiding practices which help to define "pictures of the future". Overcoming mental models and bringing concerns and beliefs out in to the open, so members of an organization may work toward a common goal.

Team Learning

Building on shared vision, by aligning goals, dreams and desires, in a manner such that a group of people function as a whole to achieve a common goal. Based on dialogue which enables effective collaboration.

Systems Thinking

The "fifth discipline". The ability and practice of consistently examining the whole system, rather than just trying to fix isolated problems. Using the conceptual framework and tools of systems thinking to clarify the full patterns and to understand how to change them most effectively. The "new dismal science" - it teaches that most obvious solutions don't work. At best, they improve matters in the short run, only to make things worse in the long run.

Senge names seven organizational learning disabilities:

1. Equating identity with a job
2. Blaming outsiders for wrongs
3. Reacting construed as proactive
4. Event-orientation rather than process-thinking
5. The boiled frog mentality to threats
6. The delusion of learning from experience
7. The myth of the management team

Today's problems come from yesterday's "solutions".

Solutions that merely shift problems from one part of a system to another often go undetected because those who "solved" the first problem are different from those who inherit the new problem.

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

When our initial efforts fail to produce lasting improvements, we "push harder" - faithful to the creed that hard work will overcome all obstacles. All the while blinding ourselves to how we are contributing to the obstacles ourselves.

Behavior grows better before it grows worse.

In complex human systems, there are always many ways to make things look better in the short run. The obvious symptoms can be cured; but eventually, the graver causes of the original problem will explode.

The easy way out 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 is a bigger hammer" syndrome.

The cure can be worse than the disease.

The long term, most insidious consequence of applying nonsystemic solutions is increased need for more and more of the solution. Low self-esteem or work-related stress is solved by social drinking, which leads to alcoholism.

Faster is slower.

The tortoise may be slower, but he wins the race. When growth becomes excessive (as it does in cancer), the organization's survival can be put at risk.

Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.

By "effect" I mean the obvious symptoms that indicate there are problems: drug abuse, unemployment, starving children, sagging profits. By "cause" I mean the interaction of the underlying system that is most responsible for generating the symptoms.

Small changes can produce big results - but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.

There are no simple rules for finding high-leverage changes, but there are ways of thinking that make it more likely - learning to see underlying "structures" rather than "events", thinking in terms of "processes of change" rather than "snapshots".

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

Low cost and high quality. Central versus local control. Happy committed employees versus competitive labor costs. Rewarding individual achievement versus everyone feeling valued. You can have both goals, if you are willing to: wait for one while focusing on the other, or, concentrate on improving both over time.

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

Dividing it in half produces a mess - a complicated problem where there is no leverage to be found because the leverage lies in interactions that cannot be seen from looking only at the piece for which you are responsible.

There is no blame.

We tend to blame "outside" circumstances for problems. Systems thinking shows us there is no outside. There is the system, the problems, and us. Any cure lies in the relationships between these parties.