The Fifth Discipline
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"Learning disabilities are tragic in children, but they are fatal in organisations. because of them, few corporations live even half as long as a person - most die before they reach the age of forty."
The organisations that excel will be those that discover how to tap their people's commitment and capacity to learn at every level in the company."
What will distinguish these companies from the traditional "controlling" organisations will be mastery of certain basic disciplines. Leading management thinker Peter Senge identifies five new "competent technologies" which provide the vital dimensions in building organisations that can truly learn:
- Systems Thinking
- Personal Mastery
- Mental Models
- Building Shared Vision
- Team Learning
Senge goes on to describe 11 laws of the 5th discipline:
- Today's problems come from yesterday's solutions.
- The harder you push, the harder the system pushes back.
- Behavior grows better before it grows worse.
- The easy way out usually leads back in.
- The cure can be worse than the disease.
- Faster is slower.
- Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
- Small changes can produce big results--but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.
- You can have your cake and eat it too--but not all at once.
- Dividing an elephant in half does not produce two small elephants.
- There is no blame.
The Fifth Discipline is a remarkable book that draws on science, spiritual values, psychology, the cutting edge of management thought and the author's work with leading companies which employ Fifth Discipline methods.
The author PETER M. SENGE is Director of the Systems Thinking and Organisational Learning Program at the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Contents
Concepts
- Page 228 introduces the idea of an organisation's ability to "harmonise diversity" in shared vision, see collaboration
- Page 240 introduces the dichotomy of dialogue/discussion
- Page 285: A good paragraph on the meaning of freedom
- Page 287: "Localness" is Peter Senge's term for what we call "bottom up"
- Page 293: Organisation as Organism
- Page 298: Resource (both tangibles and intangibles) as commons
Dichotomies
- Hierarchical/Learning organisation (top-down/bottom-up)
- Reactive/Proactive
- Reason/Intuition
- Advocacy/Inquiry
- Emotional/Creative tension
- Discussion/Dialogue
- Participitive/Reflective openness
- Divergent/Convergent problems
See also
- Society for Organizational Learning SoL was formed in April of 1997 to continue the work of MIT's Center for Organizational Learning (1991-1997). Peter Senge, author of the The Fifth Discipline: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization is the founding Chairman of SoL.
- The Dance of Change Follow-on book from Peter Senge
- Educational resources for systems thinkers
- Systems thinking from a management perspective Lots of links here
- Paper on the Learning Organisation
- Concise summary of the five disciplines
- peter senge and the learning organization
Feedback
Nad
I first read this book in 2000 after it was recommended to me by a friend. I'd mentioned to him that I was interested in applying Taoist principles to organisational systems, and he recommended I read "The fifth discipline" as it was very relevant to that line of thought. He was right, it resonated deeply and has helped to form the foundations of my understanding of an organisational system. Now about eight years later I've read it again, this time from the context of defining almost everything in systems thinking terms. The second time round was also very illuminating, it showed some good confirmations of progress in the fundamentals and a fresh perspective on how we might get some of our less productive threads rolling again!
