The fifth discipline pdf download

Revised and updated - with more than pages of new material — for the first time since its initial publication in comes a new edition of the seminal work acclaimed as one of the best books ever written about education and schools. A unique collaboration between the celebrated management thinker and Fifth Discipline author Peter Senge and a team of renowned educators and organizational change leaders, Schools that Learn describes how schools can adapt, grow, and change in the face of the demands and challenges of our society, and provides tools, techniques and references for bringing those aspirations to life.

The new revised and updated edition offers practical advice for overcoming the many challenges that face our communities and educational systems today. It shows teachers, administrators, students, parents and community members how to successfully use principles of organizational learning, including systems thinking and shared vision, to address the challenges that face our nation.

Schools that Learn Author : Peter M. How do we sustain momentum? But companies that establish change initiatives discover, after initial success, that even the most promising efforts to transform or revitalize organizations—despite interest, resources, and compelling business results—can fail to sustain themselves over time. That's because organizations have complex, well-developed immune systems, aimed at preserving the status quo.

Please choose whether or not you want other users to be able to see on your profile that this library is a favorite of yours. Finding libraries that hold this item The most successful corporation of the s will be something called a learning organization. You may have already requested this item. Please select Ok if you would like to proceed with this request anyway. See our Newsletter and FactFiles pages to download Subscribe to receive new issues, other information and articles as they become available People in learning organisations react more quickly when their environment changes because they know how to anticipate changes that are going to occur… and how to create the kinds of changes they want.

Change and learning may not exactly be synonymous, but they are inextricably linked. An organization's commitment to and capacity for learning can be no greater than that of its members.

The roots of this discipline lie in both Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, and in secular traditions as well. But surprisingly few organizations encourage the growth of their people in this manner. This results in vast untapped resources: "People enter business as bright, well- educated, high-energy people, full of energy and desire to make a difference," says Hanover's O'Brien. They lose the commitment, the sense of mission, and the excitement with which they started their careers.

We get damn little of their energy and almost none of their spirit. When you ask most adults what they want from their lives, they often talk first about Here, I am most interested in the connections between personal learning and organizational learning, in the reciprocal commitments between individual and organization, and in the special spirit of an enterprise made up of learners.

Mental Models. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior. For example, we may notice that a co-worker dresses elegantly, and say to ourselves, "She's a country club person.

Many insights into new markets or outmoded organizational practices fail to get put into practice because they conflict with powerful, tacit mental models. Shell's extraordinary success in managing through the dramatic changes and unpredictability of the world oil business in the s and s came in large measure from learning how to surface and challenge manager's mental models.

In the early s Shell was the weakest of the big seven oil companies; by the late s it was the strongest. Arie de Geus, Shell's recently retired Coordinator of Group Planning, says that continuous adaptation and growth in a changing business environment depends on "institutional learning, which is the process whereby management teams change their shared mental models of the company, their markets, and their competitors.

For this reason, we think of planning as learning and of corporate planning as institutional learning. It also includes the ability to carry on "learningful" conversations that balance inquiry and advocacy, where people expose their own thinking effectively and make that thinking open to the influence of others. Building Shared Vision. If any one idea about leadership has inspired organizations for thousands of years, it's the capacity to hold a shared picture of the future we seek to create.

One is hard pressed to think of any organization that has sustained some measure of greatness in the absence of goals, values, and missions that become deeply shared throughout the organization.

IBM had "service"; Polaroid had instant photography; Ford had public transportation for the masses and Apple had computing power for the masses. Though radically different in content and kind, all these organizations managed to bind people together around a common identity and sense of destiny. When there is a genuine vision as opposed to the all-too-familiar "vision statement" , people excel and learn, not because they are told to, but because they want to.

But many leaders have personal visions that never get translated into shared visions that galvanize an organization. All too often, a company's shared vision has revolved around the charisma of a leader, or around a crisis that galvanizes everyone temporarily.

But, given a choice, most people opt for pursuing a lofty goal, not only in times of crisis but at all times. What has been lacking is a discipline for translating individual vision into shared vision—not a "cookbook" but a set of principles and guiding practices. In mastering this discipline, leaders learn the counterproductiveness of trying to dictate a vision, no matter how heartfelt.

Team Learning. How can a team of committed managers with individual IQs above have a collective IQ of 63? The discipline of team learning confronts this paradox. We know that teams can learn; in sports, in the performing arts, in science, and even, occasionally, in business, there are striking examples where the intelligence of the team exceeds the intelligence of the individuals in the team, and where teams develop extraordinary capacities for coordinated action.

When teams are truly learning, not only are they producing extraordinary results but the individual members are growing more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise. The discipline of team learning starts with "dialogue," the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter into a genuine "thinking together.

Interestingly, the practice of dialogue has been preserved in many "primitive" cultures, such as that of the American Indian, but it has been almost completely lost to modern society. Today, the principles and practices of dialogue are being rediscovered and put into a contemporary context. Dialogue differs from the more common "discussion," which has its roots with "percussion" and "concussion," literally a heaving of ideas back and forth in a winner- takes-all competition.

The discipline of dialogue also involves learning how to recognize the patterns of interaction in teams that undermine learning. The patterns of defensiveness are often deeply engrained in how a team operates. If unrecognized, they undermine learning. If recognized and surfaced creatively, they can actually accelerate learning.

Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. This where "the rubber meets the road"; unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn.

If a learning organization were an engineering innovation, such as the airplane or the personal computer, the components would be called "technologies. By "discipline," I do not mean an "enforced order" or "means of punishment," but a body of theory and technique that must be studied and mastered to be put into practice. A discipline is a developmental path for acquiring certain skills or competencies.

As with any discipline, from playing the piano to electrical engineering, some people have an innate "gift," but anyone can develop proficiency through practice. To practice a discipline is to be a lifelong learner. You "never arrive"; you spend your life mastering disciplines. You can never say, "We are a learning organization," any more than you can say, "I am an enlightened person. Thus, a corporation cannot be "excellent" in the sense of having arrived at a permanent excellence; it is always in the state of practicing the disciplines of learning, of becoming better or worse.

That organizations can benefit from disciplines is not a totally new idea. After all, management disciplines such as accounting have been around for a long time. But the five learning disciplines differ from more familiar management disciplines in that they are "personal" disciplines.

Each has to do with how we think, what we truly want, and how we interact and learn with one another. In this sense, they are more like artistic disciplines than traditional management disciplines. Moreover, while accounting is good for "keeping score," we have never approached the subtler tasks of building organizations, of enhancing their capabilities for innovation and creativity, of crafting strategy and designing policy and structure through assimilating new disciplines.

Perhaps this is why, all too often, great organizations are fleeting, enjoying their moment in the sun, then passing quietly back to the ranks of the mediocre. While interesting, I believe such descriptions can often do more harm than good, leading to piecemeal copying and playing catch-up. I do not believe great organizations have ever been built by trying to emulate another, any more than individual greatness is achieved by trying to copy another "great person. But the DC-3 was not the end of the process.

Rather, it was the precursor of a new industry. Similarly, as the five component learning disciplines converge they will not create the learning organization but rather a new wave of experimentation and advancement. This is challenging because it is much harder to integrate new tools than simply apply them separately. But the payoffs are immense. This is why systems thinking is the fifth discipline. It is the discipline that integrates the disciplines, fusing them into a coherent body of theory and practice.

It keeps them from being separate gimmicks or the latest organization change fads. Without a systemic orientation, there is no motivation to look at how the disciplines interrelate. By enhancing each of the other disciplines, it continually reminds us that the whole can exceed the sum of its parts. For example, vision without systems thinking ends up painting lovely pictures of the future with no deep understanding of the forces that must be mastered to move from here to there.

This is one of the reasons why many firms that have jumped on the "vision bandwagon" in recent years have found that lofty vision alone fails to turn around a firm's fortunes. Without systems thinking, the seed of vision falls on harsh soil.

If nonsystemic thinking predominates, the first condition for nurturing vision is not met: a genuine belief that we can make our vision real in the future. We may say "We can achieve our vision" most American managers are conditioned to this belief , but our tacit view of current reality as a set of conditions created by somebody else betrays us.

But systems thinking also needs the disciplines of building shared vision, mental models, team learning, and personal mastery to realize its potential. Building shared vision fosters a commitment to the long term.

Mental models focus on the openness needed to unearth shortcomings in our present ways of seeing the world. Team learning develops the skills of groups of people to look for the larger picture that lies beyond individual perspectives. And personal mastery fosters the personal motivation to continually learn how our actions affect our world. Lastly, systems thinking makes understandable the subtlest aspect of the learning organization—the new way individuals perceive themselves and their world.

At the heart of a learning organization is a shift of mind—from seeing ourselves as separate from the world to connected to the world, from seeing problems as caused by someone or something "out there" to seeing how our own actions create the problems we experience. A learning organization is a place where people are continually discovering how they create their reality.

And how they can change it. As Archimedes has said, "Give me a lever long enough. People talk about being part of something larger than themselves, of being connected, of being generative. It becomes Some spend the rest of their lives looking for ways to recapture that spirit.

The most accurate word in Western culture to describe what happens in a learning organization is one that hasn't had much currency for the past several hundred years. It is a word we have used in our work with organizations for some ten years, but we always caution them, and ourselves, to use it sparingly in public.

The word is "metanoia" and it means a shift of mind. The word has a rich history. For the Greeks, it meant a fundamental shift or change, or more literally transcendence "meta"—above or beyond, as in "metaphysics" of mind "noia," from the root "nous," of mind.

In the early Gnostic Christian tradition, it took on a special meaning of awakening shared intuition and direct knowing of the highest, of God.

In the Catholic corpus the word metanoia was eventually translated as "repent. The problem with talking about "learning organizations" is that the "learning" has lost its central meaning in contemporary usage.

Most people's eyes glaze over if you talk to them about "learning" or "learning organizations. It would be nonsensical to say, "I just read a great book about bicycle riding—I've now learned that.

Through learning we re-create ourselves. Through learning we become able to do something we never were able to do. Through learning we reperceive the world and our relationship to it. Through learning we extend our capacity to create, to be part of the generative process of life. There is within each of us a deep hunger for this type of learning. For such an organization, it is not enough merely to survive.

But for a learning organization, "adaptive learning" must be joined by "generative learning," learning that enhances our capacity to create. A few brave organizational pioneers are pointing the way, but the territory of building learning organizations is still largely unexplored. It is my fondest hope that this book can accelerate that exploration.

The five disciplines described below represent the experimentation, research, writing, and invention of hundreds of people. But I have worked with all of the disciplines for years, refining ideas about them, collaborating on research, and introducing them to organizations throughout the world. When I entered graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in , I was already convinced that most of the problems faced by humankind concerned our inability to grasp and manage the increasingly complex systems of our world.

Little has happened since to change my view. Today, the arms race, the environmental crisis, the international drug trade, the stagnation in the Third World, and the persisting U. From the start at MIT I was drawn to the work of Jay Forrester, a computer pioneer who had shifted fields to develop what he called "system dynamics.

These problems were "actually systems" As I began my doctoral work, I had little interest in business management. I felt that the solutions to the Big Issues lay in the public sector. But I began to meet business leaders who came to visit our MIT group to learn about systems thinking.

These were thoughtful people, deeply aware of the inadequacies of prevailing ways of managing. They were engaged in building new types of organizations —decentralized, nonhierarchical organizations dedicated to the well-being and growth of employees as well as to success. Some had crafted radical corporate philosophies based on core values of freedom and responsibility.

Others had developed innovative organization designs. All shared a commitment and a capacity to innovate that was lacking in the public sector. Gradually, I came to realize why business is the locus of innovation in an open society. Despite whatever hold past thinking may have on the business mind, business has a freedom to experiment missing in the public sector and, often, in nonprofit organizations.

It also has a clear "bottom line," so that experiments can be evaluated, at least in principle, by objective criteria. By why were they interested in systems thinking? Too often, the most daring organizational experiments were foundering. Local autonomy produced business decisions that were disastrous for the organization as a whole. Companies pulled together during crises, and then lost all their inspiration when business improved.

Organizations which started out as booming successes, with the best possible intentions toward customers and employees, found themselves trapped in downward spirals that got worse the harder they tried to fix them. Then, we all believed that the tools of systems thinking could make a difference in these companies.

As I worked with different companies, I came to see why systems thinking was not enough by itself. It needed a new type of management practitioner to really make the most of it. At that time, in the mids, there was a nascent sense of what such a management practitioner could be.

But it had not yet crystallized. All three of these men are involved in innovative, influential companies. For eleven years I have also been involved in developing and conducting Innovation Associates' Leadership and Mastery workshops, which have introduced people from all walks of life to the fifth discipline ideas that have grown out of our work at MIT, combined with IA's path-breaking work on building shared vision and personal mastery.

Over four thousand managers have attended. We started out with a particular focus on corporate senior executives, but soon found that the basic disciplines such as systems thinking, personal mastery, and shared vision were relevant for teachers, public administrators and elected officials, students, and parents.

All were in leadership positions of importance. All were in "organizations" that had still untapped potential for creating their future. All felt that to tap that potential required developing their own capacities, that is, learning. So, this book is for the learners, especially those of us interested in the art and practice of collective learning.

For managers, this book should help in identifying the specific practices, skills, and disciplines that can make building learning organizations less of an occult art though an art nonetheless.

For parents, this book should help in letting our children be our teachers, as well as we theirs—for they have much to teach us about learning as a way of life. Few large corporations live even half as long as a person. The chances are fifty-fifty that readers of this book will see their present firm disappear during their working career. In most companies that fail, there is abundant evidence in advance that the firm is in trouble.

This evidence goes unheeded, however, even when individual managers are aware of it. The organization as a whole cannot recognize impending threats, understand the implications of those threats, or come up with alternatives.

Perhaps under the laws of "survival of the fittest," this continual death of firms is fine for society. Painful though it may be for the employees and owners, it is simply a turnover of the economic soil, redistributing the resources of production to new companies and new cultures.

But what if the high corporate mortality rate is only a symptom of deeper problems that afflict all companies, not just the ones that die? What if even the most successful companies are poor learners—they survive but never live up to their potential? What if, in light of what organizations could be, "excellence" is actually "mediocrity"? It is no accident that most organizations learn poorly. The way they are designed and managed, the way people's jobs are defined, and, most importantly, the way we have all been taught to think and interact not only in organizations but more broadly create fundamental learning disabilities.

These disabilities operate despite the best efforts of bright, committed people. Often the harder they try to solve problems, the worse the results. What learning does occur takes place despite these learning disabilities—for they pervade all organizations to some degree.

Learning disabilities are tragic in children, especially when they go undetected. They are no less tragic in organizations, where they also go largely undetected. The first step in curing them is to begin to identify the seven learning disabilities: 1.

When a large American steel company began closing plants in the early s, it offered to train the displaced steelworkers for new jobs. But the training never "took"; the workers drifted into unemployment and odd jobs instead. Psychologists Most see themselves within a "system" over which they have little or no influence. They "do their job," put in their time, and try to cope with the forces outside of their control.

Consequently, they tend to see their responsibilities as limited to the boundaries of their position. Recently, managers from a Detroit auto maker told me of stripping down a Japanese import to understand why the Japanese were able to achieve extraordinary precision and reliability at lower cost on a particular assembly process.

They found the same standard type of bolt used three times on the engine block. Each time it mounted a different type of component. On the American car, the same assembly required three different bolts, which required three different wrenches and three different inventories of bolts—making the car much slower and more costly to assemble.

Why did the Americans use three separate bolts? Because the design organization in Detroit had three groups of engineers, each responsible for "their component only.

The irony is that each of the three groups of American engineers considered their work successful because their bolt and assembly worked just fine.

When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact.

Moreover, when results are disappointing, it can be very difficult to know why. All you can do is assume that "someone screwed up. There is in each of us a propensity to find someone or something outside ourselves to blame when things go wrong. Some organizations elevate this propensity to a commandment: "Thou shall always find an external agent to blame. Engineering blames marketing: "If they'd only quit screwing up our designs and let us design the products we are capable of, we'd be an industry leader.

When we focus only on our position, we do not see how our own actions extend beyond the boundary of that position. When those actions have consequences that come back to hurt us, we misperceive these new problems as externally caused.

Like the person being chased by his own shadow, we cannot seem to shake them. The "Enemy Is Out There" syndrome is not limited to assigning blame within the organization. During its last years of operation, the once highly successful People Express Airlines slashed prices, boosted marketing, and bought Frontier Airlines—all in a frantic attempt to fight back against the perceived cause of its demise: increasingly aggressive competitors.

Yet, none of these moves arrested the company's mounting losses or corrected its core problem, service quality that had declined so far that low fares were its only remaining pull on customers.

For many American companies, "the enemy" has become Japanese competition, labor unions, government regulators, or customers who "betrayed us" by buying products from someone else. This learning Score: 4. These companies will be the successful ones in the coming decade because of their ability to learn, to absorb new ideas, theories and practices at all employee levels and use them to competive adventage. Shared vision, teamwork and leverage are the main themes of this book.

In The Fifth Discipline, he draws the blueprints for an organisation where people ex. Score: 5. Professor Flood's book explains and critiques the ideas in straight forward terms. This book makes significant and fundamental improvements to the core discipline - systemic thinking.

It establishes crucial developments in systemic thinking in the context of the learning organisation, including creativity and organisational transformation. It is therefore a very important text for strategic planners, organisational change agents and consultants.

This question is the enduring management issue, a perennial problem that Stephen Bungay shows has an old solution that is counter-intuitive and yet common sense. The Art of Action is a thought-provoking and fresh look at how managers can turn planning into execution,.

Essays and case studies present advice on applying learning organization principles on a local level to help rebuild and strengthen American schools.

Home The Fifth Discipline. The Fifth Discipline. The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. The Dance of Change by Peter M. Schools that Learn by Peter M.